Summer means fresh berries. To showcase them, like Sonya’s favorite boobreeze, I recently bought myself a nine-inch tart pan. I’ve been making, serving, and eating chocolate-berry tarts with fiendish delight.  I found this great recipe. It’s so easy. As easy as pie. Or as easy as tart. Anyway, it’s really easy. Other than berries, you just need six ingredients.

For the crust, you need 8 ounces of chocolate wafer cookies (I’ve been using Loacker, which I found at Provigo), 2 tablespoons of sugar (hey, not bad), 6 tablespoons of unsalted melted butter (hey, not bad, either), and a wee bit (a half a teaspoon) of salt. That’s it. Blend it all up in your mini food processor.

Press the crumb mixture into the tart pan. Bake for twenty minutes at 350. When the tart crust is done, put it on a cooling rack. On a stove, warm up 1 and a quarter cup of heavy cream until it just starts to bubble, then pour it over 1 and a half cups of semisweet chocolate chips in a bowl. Stir, stir, stir until it’s all ooey and gooey and pour it on top of the baked tart.

Put it in the fridge. Cool it off. Let it set. Then pack as many berries on top as you can! Try it! You’ll love it! So simple and quick to prepare, yet it looks so fancy and tastes so great!

Even other knitters who saw me knitting would ask me what I was making.

Drex inquired politely: “Is it a bag?”

When it finally came off the needles, after what seemed like round after endless round of American moss stitch, Sonya tried to figure out what to do with it. At least she knew it was something to wear.

“Jacket!” she announced, wrapping it around her neck like a cozy shawl.

All right, I have to admit, it looks a bit odd when laid flat on the ground— a long tube with a pointy end.

It’s a going-away present for my friend Leah. I picked the emerald green color of the Cascade Eco Wool to match her eyes. I’m so pleased that the cowl drapes nicely around her neck and is long enough so that she can pull it over her head to stay warm in the cold Minnesota winters.

She and her husband Forest leave on Sunday. As I started preparing tonight’s farewell dinner with the girls in the kitchen, I started crying. A lot of our friends are moving away— Leah and Forest are the first to leave. Then Mahsa, Pedram, and Rusby fly to Brighton, England next week. Then Jess and Barry move to Toronto the week after.

To cheer myself up, and to soothe Sonya’s anxiety over seeing Mommy cry, I sang a song I learned in Girl Scouts: Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold. A circle is round, it has no end. That’s how long I want to be your friend.

Our family has pieces of gold scattered around the world. But I’m greedy. I want all my gold right here.

Gradually, Sonya shed all her baby nicknames, but I still have my fun with Leenabeena. I came up with the nickname because of its rhyme factor, but it makes me think of a “little bean” planted in the soil, getting ready to sprout. And there’s something about L-bean’s perfectly round, mostly bald chickpea head.

Sonya has a more unexpected nickname for her sister. Let me give you the backstory. Sonya now refers to herself as “Self.” For example, when I bend over to help her with her shoes, she shakes her head and says, “Self do that.”

Then she proceeds to take at least ten minutes fidgeting with the heel strap and eventually putting her sandal on the wrong foot.

“I like how you put that shoe on by yourself, but I think it might feel better on the other foot,” I’ll say, reminding myself to be patient as I mentally go over the grocery list, the errand list, the chore list, and all the other mental lists I keep.

“Other foot,” she’ll repeat, as she takes off the shoe and painstakingly puts it on her other foot.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting on the floor, stretching, and talking to Leena.  I was brainstorming the next plot twist in the story I’m writing. Sonya wandered in from her raid of the toy room, arms overflowing, dropped a block at the doorway, a wooden car next to the sofa, and sat down near Leena and me with Little Mickey, Big Mickey, and Elmo.

“Mommy,” Sonya said, handing me Elmo. “Self,” she said, holding onto Big Mickey. And then— ”Other Self,” she said, tucking Little Mickey under Leena’s wiggling arms.

Sonya knows the meaning of the word Self. She knows it’s used to speak about herself, her person, her individual self, apart from Mommy or Daddy or anyone else.  ”Self do that.” She also knows the meaning of Other. Not the left foot, but the right foot. Something similar, but not quite the same.

There may come a day when these two fight over Big Mickey, so I’m just going to cherish this phase. Sonya Self and Leenabeena Other Self.

Nevilles, this isn’t the last you’ll see of us, but you’ll be missed for sure. Perhaps it’s best said in French: vous allez nous manquer.

Drex and I started a book club for two. We take turns organizing dates inspired by what we’re reading. Drex picked our first selection, Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. He described it as a “literary Hindenburg.” You can read his entire book review here.

Now it’s my turn to pick our selection. I’ve been wanting to read the Game of Thrones fantasy series by George R.R. Martin for awhile now, especially since the fourth book just came out! The first book, A Song of Ice and Fire, is a daunting 720 pages long. Drex and I are two hundred pages deep into the intrigue, and we’re gripped! It’s fun to discuss the characters and plot twists together. I can’t wait to watch the HBO miniseries.

Here I am sitting on the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. Click here to own the throne yourself!

I have my mind… and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.

— spoken by Tyrion Lannister

It’s important to stay sharp. Appearances can be deceiving, and the balance of power can easily shift. In the House of Ruths, we know who really rules supreme.

The summer heat wave has forced us to stay sealed in our air conditioned living room for most of the day. After lunch, it was finally time to open our surprise fabric grab bag from emeline & annabelle. Sonya stayed busy for about an hour looking at all the scraps and organizing them into different piles.

I’m going to incorporate these gorgeous scraps in a quilt I’ve been planning for some time.  After Leena outgrows her baby clothes, I sort them into four groups: (1) excellent condition: put in storage for third child— in the extended family (2) good, clean condition: donate to Goodwill (3) soiled: use for scrap quilt and (4) all used up: toss in the trash— though I briefly considered making paper.

My stash of outgrown clothes for a scrap quilt has become substantial, so I went through the heap, trying to find different pieces that work together. This quilt is definitely going to have the aesthetic of a scrap quilt— charming, special, and lovely in its own way.

The inspiration for the design comes from Setsuko Inagawa’s quilt from this year’s Tokyo Quilt Festival. I followed an excellent tutorial found here.

Each block is a fun puzzle to put together. I look forward to working on the quilt, bit by bit, over the next few months.

At the end of her new book, Sonya gets a dog. Because she believes that stories depict her actual life, when we walked around the park this evening, she pointed at various dogs asking, “Mommy Sonya dog? Sonya puppy home? Toyee Ibee Pepper?”

Then she had a eureka moment in the bathtub like Archimedes: “Mommy Daddy— dog— home—Sonya— fly Spain?”

The verbs might be missing, the direct objects might be scrambled, but I know what Sonya is trying to say. Mommy, is Daddy bringing a dog for Sonya when he flies home from Spain?

What a breakthrough! The communication of a complete idea! In my careless enthusiasm, I shouted, “Hooray, Sonya!” and clapped my hands.

She absorbed my excitement. Her face lit up. “HOOORAAY!” she shouted, clenching her fists, trembling, then raising her wet arms in the air.

Uh oh. I suddenly realized my mistake. “Sonya, I was so impressed that you used so many beautiful words, I got excited and clapped, but Daddy is not—” [I shook my head to emphasize the word] “— not bringing a dog home for Sonya. No dog, Sonya.”

“Puppy?”

She looked at me with those deep dark chocolate eyes. What could I say?

“Um, well, maybe Sonya, who knows?”

So, um, well, Drex, in case Sonya looks disappointed when you finally come home on Friday or if she maybe starts clawing at your suitcase, you’ll know why. It’s Justin and Melissa’s fault.

One of the greatest pleasures of parenthood is passing on my love of reading. Sonya will bring a book for me to read aloud while I’m nursing Leena on the living room sofa. Now that Sonya is a sophisticated two-year-old, we’ve graduated from baby board books (those are for Leena now!) and moved onto picture books with real foldable, crease-able, rip-pable paper pages. Yesterday, Sonya brought me a new selection. One we’ve never read before.

I vaguely remembered Ferdinand the Bull from my childhood.  He liked to sit peacefully under a tree and smell flowers, so as you might imagine, he wasn’t a vicious bull in the bullfighting arena.

But I had no idea that his biography started like this:

“MICKEY MOUSE HOUSE! MICKEY MOUSE HOUSE!” Sonya shrieked when she saw the castle on the first page. All castles are now mistaken for Cinderella’s Castle in the Magic Kingdom.

“That’s a castle,” I said, “with tall, tall turrets just like the castle at Mickey Mouse House. But this castle is in Spain where Daddy is.”

Sonya looked at me and nodded her head.  ”Daddy workin. Pain. Fly plane.”

Since I’m fluent in Sonya-ese, I can tell you, she said, “Daddy’s working.  In Spain.  He flew there on a plane.”

Just to be sure, I checked with her. She nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Cows. One… Two. Four. Seven.”

What’s interesting: she skipped three, five, and six, but got the right number of cows in the picture. I’m not sure if it was just coincidence, luck, or genius. As her mother, I’m inclined to go with genius.

Then came a part of the book I didn’t remember:

“AAAAAH! BEEEEE!!! GOTCHOOBEE!” Sonya screamed, pointing frantically at the illustration. Then we spent a few minutes discussing Sonya’s unfortunate encounter with a bumblebee— two and four days ago. “Bee. Grass. Sticker. Toe. Gotchoobee. Hurtin. Toe. Ay-gain. I kick it.”

Sonya got stung by a bee twice in one week! The first time, she got stung on her big toe when she was walking barefoot in the grass with Drex. The stinger of the bee (which she calls “sticker”) had to be tweezed out by Daddy. Her toe turned red, but she was “ah-kay.”

The second time, I saw it happen. I was carrying Leena across the field to the playground.  Prancing in her flip-flops, Sonya saw the bee near a patch of flowers, buzzing around, pollinating things, minding its own business. But then Sonya freaked out and decided to kick the bee.

“AAAAAH! GOTCHOOBEE! I KICK IT!!!” she declared. And then got stung in the left shin.

At least now I know Sonya isn’t allergic to bee stings. “Oh, gotchoobee hurt!” she moaned. “I kick it. Hurt. Leg. Sticker. Oh, gotchoobee.”

She’s been telling everyone this story.

Yeah, Ferdinand the Bull, the bee gotchoo, too. Sonya gave this page in the book a kiss. And she kept giving Ferdinand kisses each time we reread the book (maybe thirty? forty? a million times?) since yesterday.

Tonight before going to sleep Sonya said, “Daddy Fernidad?”

“Yes, Daddy and Ferdinand are in Spain.”

“Bullfightin?”

“No, Daddy isn’t bullfighting.”

“Smellin fowers?”

“Daddy and Ferdinand are smelling flowers,” I suggested.

“No, Daddy workin,” Sonya corrected. Such a faithful Daddy’s girl. “Daddy workin pooter.”

“That’s right, Sonya. Daddy’s working on his computer right now.”

“Miss you, Daddy. Back soon?”

Then Sonya closed her eyes and pretended to go to sleep, her head on the pillow, her arm wrapped around Big Mickey. Less than fifteen seconds later, her eyes snapped open, her head lifted up, and she said, “AAAHH! GOTCHOOBEE!”

On her sturdy legs, Leena stands in the Exersaucer. By chance, her hands will occasionally swat something and make it jiggle or rattle, and she’ll break into a huge grin. Even as a small baby, we all like to believe that our efforts can produce a change in the world around us.

While Drex is off in Barcelona, I’m so grateful for friends who bring a potluck picnic to the park. I step outside to enjoy good company, good food, and good weather— is there a better way to spend an evening after a day of playing in the sand and shaking a tambourine with John DuRant?

After the sun went down and we’d all eaten at least two generous pieces of pie (our friend Barry made the tarte aux bleuets sauvages), and it was time to begin a late bedtime routine, we all missed Daddy. No matter how many distractions I schedule into the day, we feel his absence and count the sleeps until we wake up and he is here again.